Ben Werdmuller leaves Curverider

Recent Articles

• Critique of Timeline Lesson

  July 19, 2010 in multimedia, open knowledge, pedagogy, presentations

  The animated Chinese timeline shown my previous blog post was a demonstration of a workflow using proprietary software to make a stand alone animated timeline. While viewing the timeline several times, I started examining it through the prism of the research on multimedia learning that I have been reading–particularly that of Richard Mayer. One learning [...]

• Create animated timelines as OERs

  July 17, 2010 in multimedia, open knowledge

  This is a fairly specialized procedure for users of Keynote and TimeLine 3D, both proprietary Mac programs. The important thing is that it results in something that could be a high quality OER. I had a couple requests for a how-to on building a timeline like the one shown below. Bee Doc’s Timeline 3D is [...]

• How to turn a Flickr image into an OER

  July 12, 2010 in multimedia, open knowledge

  If you have a Flickr account, one of the easiest ways to to contribute open educational resources (OERs) is to Creative Commons license your images. Once you have done so, your photographs will appear on Flickr’s Creative Commons search page according to the license that you have designated. This is quick and simple to do. [...]

• How about a summer of OER?

  July 10, 2010 in open knowledge

  In general, teachers love freebies and actively seek them out. These free things range from blogs to web apps to lesson plans. I’d like to challenge teachers to go beyond just consuming freebies to producing them as well. Teachers create great resources all the time in the course of their practice. We could go a [...]

• Multimedia Researcher Mayer on Slideware

  July 7, 2010 in multimedia, presentations

  Richard Mayer is one of the leading researchers on the impact of multimedia on learning. However, in his two books, Multimedia Learning and e-Learning (coauthored by Ruth Colvin Clark), slideware is not often mentioned. Multimedia Learning he simply mentions PowerPoint presentations as an example of multimedia. Since I have ben exploring his research as a [...]

• Text and Graphics in Multimedia Presentations

  June 30, 2010 in Technology, multimedia, presentations

  My presentation design has been greatly influenced by Nancy Duarte’s book slide:ology and Garr Reynolds, the author of Presentation Zen. I have integrated their ideas in both my conferences and instructional presentations. Their advice has dramatically changed my practice from bullet points to slides that are more graphically oriented with much less text. Both Duarte’ [...]

• Rethinking CC Licensing

  June 24, 2010 in open knowledge

  Working with open educational resources (OER) and sharing, I constantly grapple with copyright. I have come to a greater appreciation of explicitly stated licensing. As a consumer of such resources, I often must search, parse, and decipher to determine whether they are OER. This has caused me to reconsider my practices as a content creator. [...]

• BuddyPress Installation for the Masses

  June 19, 2010 in Elgg, Social Networking, Technology, buddypress, open source

  I recently created another BuddyPress test site and I am pleased with how much the procedure has been simplified. I blogged about the difficulty in the past, so it is only fair that I note vast improvements. I never fully succeeded installing BP the first time I tried. It involved a long process of manually uploading a [...]

• What about an Open Educational Resource Torrent Tracker?

  June 19, 2010 in Technology, open knowledge

  There are many resources on the Internet dedicated to open educational resources. Some are sites, for example Curriki, that provide online communities for sharing such resources. Others are search sites such as CC Search that provide links to open licensed resources throughout the Internet. The one variant that I have not yet found is a [...]

• Sharing isn’t simple II

  June 13, 2010 in Technology, open knowledge, open source, presentations

  Copyright issues are not the only obstacles to sharing content with others. Some of the obstacles are my choice of software and platform. Although I am an advocate of open source software, my focus in this area has been server based applications. When it comes to desktop computing, I run a Mac. I like the [...]